Are you suffering from diabetes mellitus? Does your baby seem to be putting up a lot of weight recently? Did your doctor prescribe you to keep your weight in check after the recent heart attack? These questions are frequently asked by your health care providers, nurses, and doctors upon visiting a hospital or a clinic. In most cases, upon visiting a hospital, health care staff will ask patients to stand on a professional body composition scale and take some measurements. But exactly what do they measure? We have some interesting insights for you.
Weight and BMI (Body Mass Index)
The most basic function of any professional body composition scale is to measure your weight. Apart from weight, some other machines do measure your height too. Once done with your height and weight, health care staffs do measure your body mass index, simply referred to as BMI, by calculating the weight to height ratio. Ever wondered how physicians tell if you are overweight, underweight or obese? They calculate your BMI and compare it with preset values, and bang!
BMR (Basal Metabolic Rate)
Some top of the line machines can measure your basal metabolic rate (BMR). To keep things simple, basal metabolic rate indicates the amount of energy required by your body at resting state each day to function properly. You can effectively increase your BMR by adding a few pounds to your muscle mass. That means, the athletes you see on television screen each day are likely to have higher BMR than average Joe or John.
Total Body Water
Suppose you are a 21-year-old boy weighing about 65kg. Do you think all of this weight is due to muscle and bone mass? Nothing can be more wrong than this. In fact, most of your body weight is due to the vast amount of fluid in your body. Hence, this measurement is extremely crucial if your health care provider suspects any sort of disease that might eliminate water from the body.
Body Fat Mass
Fat is one of the essential components of our body. But it can be a source of trouble too. Hence, you might see doctors taking note of someone’s fat content within the body when they suspect a diabetes mellitus or a cardiac condition. Health care providers often measure your body fat mass, that is the total weight of fat in your body. It might be expressed as total fat weight in Kg, or as a percentage compared to your total body weight.
Once professional body composition scale were limited to your body weight measurement. Nowadays, with the advancement of technologies newer measurements are being added to these scales each day, and you are the direct beneficiary of such novel attempts by companies and researchers.
